Gay villages exist in almost every major city, and the word was chosen deliberately, and it means what it says
Village Soho holds a 4.4 from two thousand two hundred and ninety-six people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is on Old Compton Street.
And the word village, in this context, is not decorative.
The gay village
It is a real term and it describes a real thing – a concentration of bars, shops, clubs and services, in a defined few streets, which exists in almost every large city in the Western world.
Canal Street in Manchester. The Castro in San Francisco. The Gay Village in Montreal. Old Compton Street here.
And the word chosen, in almost every case, is village.
Not district. Not quarter. Not scene. Village – which is the smallest unit of settlement in English, and which carries a specific set of implications: that everybody knows each other, that you can walk it, and that it is somewhere you belong rather than somewhere you go.
Why it had to be a place
Because it was the only infrastructure there was.
We wrote about this at Comptons, a few doors from here. Homosexuality was a criminal offence in England until 1967. The equal age of consent did not arrive until 2001. Section 28 was in force until 2003.
Which meant that for most of the twentieth century, there was no institution. No official body. No listing in the phone book. Nothing that could advertise.
The bars were the network. It was where you found out what was happening, where you found a room, where you found a doctor who would not report you – and where, during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, an enormous amount of care and fundraising was organised by people with no institutional support whatsoever.
A village is what you build when nobody will build anything for you.
And now
The bars are closing.
Not because of hostility, in the main – because of rent, and because of the internet, and because a great many young gay people now, entirely reasonably, do not feel that they need a designated street.
Which is, on any honest reading, a victory. The whole purpose of the village was to be somewhere safe when nowhere else was.
And there is a real loss in it as well, and the people who built it are entitled to say so, and a great many of them do.
Verdict
Cheap, loud, cheerful, and standing in a street that had to be invented because nowhere else would have them.
Go, have a pint, and enjoy the fact that this is now unremarkable.
What a village needs
A pub, a shop, and somewhere to stand outside.
That is genuinely it, and it is the definition that every planner in Britain has spent seventy years failing to internalise – because you cannot build community, you can only build the room in which it might happen and then leave people alone in it.
The gay village worked because it had all three, in a few streets, and because nobody was supervising.
Every new development in this country has a public realm strategy and a community engagement plan and no pub.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My therapist asked what I do with my frustration. I said “apparently I read London satire in public and scare strangers with laughing fits.”